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Law Spoils Tobacco’s Taste, Australians Say

Plainer packages and tougher warnings have been required for all tobacco products in Australia since Dec. 1.Credit
Andrew Quilty for The International Herald Tribune

SYDNEY, Australia — More than seven months have passed since Australia imposed one of the world’s toughest laws for tobacco warning labels, swapping iconic packaging for graphic images of mouth ulcers, cancerous lungs and gangrenous limbs.

And though experts say it is too soon to know what impact the law has had on tobacco use, one thing is certain: Smokers think the cigarettes taste off. Complaints started to roll in about the flavor of cigarettes almost immediately after the law went into effect on Dec. 1. That could mean a lot for health advocates’ efforts to prevent smoking.

“Of course there was no reformulation of the product,” the Australian health minister, Tanya Plibersek, said in an interview. “It was just that people being confronted with the ugly packaging made the psychological leap to disgusting taste.”

She said it would be a number of years before she could say that the effort decreased smoking rates and improved residents’ health. “But the best short-term indication I have that it’s working is the flood of calls we had in the days after the introduction of plain packaging accusing the government of changing the taste of cigarettes,” Ms. Plibersek said.

All parties in the battle over smoking in Australia have their own take on the law’s effects. The most reliable sales figures are proprietary and guarded by the tobacco companies, while the government’s latest figures will not be released until September.

Australia has been out in front in requiring graphic imagery on tobacco labels. European Union ministers agreed last month on new rules that would require a health warning that would combine pictures and text and cover 65 percent of the front and back of all cigarette packs, up from 40 percent. The rules require approval by the European Parliament.

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Sol Levy Tobacconist in Sydney.Credit
Andrew Quilty for The International Herald Tribune

In the United States, a 2009 law empowered the Food and Drug Administration to require large graphic and text warnings on the top half of the front and back of cigarette packs. But as federal courts have wrestled with the details of that law in challenges by the tobacco industry, the F.D.A. has not yet imposed a final set of labeling requirements.

Tobacco is taxed heavily in Australia, where smokers spend about 16 Australian dollars, or $14.70, for a pack of cigarettes. Partly as a result, smoking rates in Australia have declined. Last year, according to the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 20.4 percent of adult men were smokers and 16.3 percent of adult women smoked. In the United States, the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the smoking rate was 21.5 percent among adult men and 17.3 percent for adult women.

Smoking is also banned in nearly all enclosed public spaces in Australia, including restaurants, bars, sporting facilities and places of business.

The new labeling law, which bans brand logos and requires health warnings to cover 75 percent of the front of cigarette packages and 90 percent of the back, aims to remove the allure of well-known brands. Last year, a challenge to the law brought by British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Japan Tobacco and Philip Morris Australia — arguing that it was a violation of their intellectual property rights — was dismissed by the Australian High Court.

The packaging law is quickly becoming an international trade issue. Philip Morris Asia, whose headquarters are in Hong Kong, is challenging the legislation under a broad 1993 bilateral trade agreement aimed at promoting and protecting trade between Australia and Hong Kong. Philip Morris argues that by stripping its products of their brand identity, the law hurts its intellectual property in violation of that agreement.

Cuba, the world’s dominant producer of fine cigars, filed a “request for consultations” in May with Australia through the World Trade Organization, the first time the country has used the forum to confront another nation directly over its commercial laws. The Dominican Republic, Honduras and Ukraine have already challenged Australia over the issue at the W.T.O., citing “technical barriers” to trade and violations of intellectual property rights.

In another closely followed move, Japan Tobacco, Asia’s biggest publicly listed cigarette maker, said at the end of June that it had filed suit against the Thai government over its plan, announced in April, to increase the size of graphic health warnings to 85 percent of the cigarette pack cover, from 55 percent.

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Tanya Plibersek, health minister, offered an explanation about smokers’ complaints: “People being confronted with the ugly packaging made the psychological leap to disgusting taste.”Credit
Andrew Quilty for The International Herald Tribune

The taste issue comes into sharp focus at Sol Levy Tobacconist. Evelyn Platus, whose grandfather was the founding Mr. Levy, has managed the shop on a prime strip of real estate in what is now Sydney’s booming Chinatown for more than 20 years. On a recent afternoon, it was nearly empty. Her business, she said, has been hurt by high taxes and restrictive rules governing tobacco. But when it comes to plain packaging, the ire she normally reserves for the “nanny state” is pointed at Big Tobacco.

“The cigarette companies will deny it, but all of our customers are telling us the cigarettes taste different. The government’s spruiked it as a mind-over-matter thing, but I don’t believe so,” Ms. Platus said, using Australian slang for making a pitch. She said, “With all of the changes they were forced to make, there was no way to recoup their money, so the cigarette companies appear to have taken advantage of it and sourced their product from somewhere else.”

It is a common refrain among Australian smokers and is repeated on Internet forums dedicated to the issue. In some versions of the conspiracy theory, the government is responsible for changing the taste; in others, the state is accused of having colluded with the tobacco companies.

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Scott McIntyre, a spokesman for British American Tobacco, dismissed concerns about flavor. “It’s the same tobacco, being made in the same way, in the same Australian factories by the same people as it always has been made for a very long time,” he said in an interview at the company’s headquarters here.

The new restrictions have had no effect on tobacco sales, he said, but he declined to provide any numbers, citing confidentiality.

Some experts quietly predicted such an outcome before the law was enacted, said Simon Chapman, a professor of public health at the University of Sydney. That smokers are citing an unpleasant reaction to their longtime brands is a positive early sign for antismoking advocates, he said.

“You can influence the perception of taste by the packaging that something comes in. The most obvious example of that is wine,” he said. In any given liquor store, “you don’t know most of the wines, and you kind of go, ‘That one looks like it’ll be good.’ Packaging really does cue taste.”

Correction: July 10, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of time since Australia imposed one of the world’s toughest laws for tobacco warning labels. It is more than seven months, not almost six months.